Thursday, August 24, 2006
An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer takes a different spin on the topic of YA's reading adult books, that is, adults reading YA books (thanks to Bookslut for the tip). God knows they will find some good reading, but I wonder if it's damning with faint praise to say, as B&N bookseller Lisa Santamaria does, that adults may want "something a little more entertaining or fluffy, so they come to the kids' section, only to find out that these books are not necessarily fluffy at all. Like Harry Potter - it makes you think." If it were up to me, I'd replace Harry Potter in that sentence with . . . --I was going to give an example from any number of candidates, but then I was stymied by the possibly half-baked notion that YA literature is on the whole more interested in making us feel than think. Some do both (Aidan Chambers' novels come to mind) but so many more aim for our emotional investment in a character and situation, rather than (or also) occasioning readers to ask questions about themselves and their beliefs. Shall we compile a list, or am I overreaching?